Tag Archives: Infoblox

We at ElasticBox are really excited about our partnership with Infoblox to integrate “Network Control” into your process for developing and deploying applications in a cloud environment. To align with the Infoblox press release today, I wanted to provide a little more detail on how Infoblox and ElasticBox work together.

First let’s define the partnership at a high level, and from a conceptual point of view. ElasticBox is a DevOps Platform that enables IT operations to deliver IT as a Service and also provides a collaboration mechanism for operations and developers to define and deploy applications in a modular process across any cloud environment – private, public, and hybrid. Infoblox, on the other hand, provides a powerful solution to centralize and automate network provisioning and control. So together, ElasticBox and Infoblox ensure that when you are developing, orchestrating, and deploying your applications in the cloud, everything – including the network – will work, automatically.

OK, I am being told that I should probably provide some more detail…

ElasticBox uses webhooks to provide a high level of integration to Infoblox. A quick example of how ElasticBox uses webhooks to integrate with Infoblox follows – you’ll see in the diagram below that Infoblox can discover IP endpoints and assign IP addresses reliably in your network.

By using webhooks within ElasticBox, you can integrate that Infoblox network configuration capability into your automated ElasticBox application deployment process. Follow these three steps to set up the integration:

Build a custom web service for Infoblox. On the hosting web server such as Apache, add a web service resource that interfaces with Infoblox. In the resource, add the service, machine, and instance objects that ElasticBox can talk to when making web calls.

Add a customization spec. Add customization specifications for Linux and Windows templates in vSphere so they can accept the custom parameters from ElasticBox.

Add the webhook to ElasticBox. Finally, add the web service host URL as a webhook in ElasticBox.

Once this is done, it’s plug and play. Whenever users deploy applications using Box templates from ElasticBox onto vSphere, ElasticBox sends a HTTP POST request to the Infoblox custom web service. Infoblox returns the machine object appended with the IP address information. ElasticBox passes this on to vSphere to provision the Windows or Linux virtual machine based on the customization spec.

That gives you an idea of how ElasticBox webhooks can integrate closely with your Infoblox solution. Have any questions or need help getting started? Let us know how we can help.